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really disappointing

Review written by my husband...

When we had our daughter Mrs B and I decided we needed to buy a decent thermometer especially with all of the swine flu scares that were going around at the time. We had heard that typical 'on forehead' thermomters that people often use for babies are unreliable so we opted for a more expensive one.

We chose this 'grow with me' thermometer as it was £30 and we did our usual "Oh it's expensive, it must be worth it!" thing. The staff in John Lewis' did also recommend it against a cheaper version so we thought it would be a good buy.The thermometer has some very useful features. For a start it stores the past 5 readings so if you can't remember what the last ones were you can have it saved within the thermometer. This is useful to see how the temperature has progressed over time so is a useful comparison.

The nozzle also is useful as it pops off to make it smaller for little babies' ears this makes it possible to be used in little babies as well as toddlers, children and adults alike.It only takes a matter of seconds to work. You simply turn it on, put it in the ear and press the top button which means it's ready to go. A few seconds later it will beep. It will be a continuous beep if it's above normal or just a standard one beep if it's normal. The temperature displays on the screen and is lit up green for normal, red for high/low. This is easy to read even in low light as it's lit up well.

The thermometer looks quite sleek and is easy to hold as it's tall and slim and seems to be moulded to fit the hand well. It is white and blue and looks more interesting than a standard thermometer which is useful when babies are involved and you're trying not to scare them.When reading the above you must be thinking why only one star then? It sounds useful, different, easy to use and it looks good. In theory yes but in reality no.

We have been majorly disappointed by this purchase and I think it was the biggest waste of £30 we have ever spent especially on something which you rely on.Firstly the thermometer battery life appears to be none. We used it a few times and it kept turning off half way through. I wasn't sure if we were doing something wrong- perhaps we were possibly pressing the off button and not the ready button? Sometimes when trying to turn it on it just wouldn't turn on and we had to keep pressing the button down really hard, we'd try holding it down for longer, everything and there was no consistency, sometimes it would turn on, other times it would just remain blank.

When we have eventually got the thermometer to turn on it has then not been at all reliable in taking an accurate temperature. Fortunately over the last few months Baby B hasn't been too poorly so even when we have tried to use this we've not really taken much notice of the reading which constantly seems to say she is 33 degrees when know that that is so low it's not accurate.However, on Wednesday this week our baby suddenly became very ill. She was burning up and constantly being sick. We spent a good five minutes trying to turn the thermometer on whilst the baby was crying and Mrs B panicking. The last thing you want in this situation is to be struggling to turn a machine on!

Once on it turned off again immediately. After a few more attempts we managed to get it to stay on long enough to go in the baby's ear and press the button. This was all well and good but when the thermometer just gave a single beep and was showing up green we thought it was quite strange as our baby didn't look at all well. It came back as 36 which is perfectly normal and well. we took it a further five times and it still came up as normal.Our baby then started to be unresponsive and we rushed her to the doctor's who took her temperature and it turned out it was 40+ and we were admitted straight to hospital with an extremely poorly baby.

I cannot believe that we have spent £30 on a product which would have been so useful, instead we wasted a good ten minutes trying to work it and then just getting an inaccurate result and had to waste time and rush to hospital in the end.The thermometer seems to be so geared up to do fancy things like recording the last readings and having different beeps for different things that it lacks all the basics- to be able to actually work.

Unfortunately this thermometer was bought several months ago so we can no longer take it back and get our money back but I will be writing to John Lewis' and telling them of the design fault and I do hope that this review saves you from buying into this product too.All I can say is the more expensive item isn't always the best! A complete waste of time and money which cost us valuable time when our baby was extremely ill.

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Digital thermometer that reads both babies and adults

My mother bought this as a gift for me when my daughter was born but it is selling for £24.95 on Amazon. I found it to be an essential tool to have in my medicine cabinet and one of the most useful gifts I recieved when my daughter was born.

The thermometer itself has a screen about an inch wide that displays the temperature. If your child or an adult has a fever it will beep and flash red otherwise it will stay green. There are two buttons on top and on the bottom of this screen which turn it on and the other starts it. You press start when it is actually in your ear for an accurate read.

By holding down the start key you can also change the way it reads, whether if be Celsius or Farenheit. I use Celsius but my mother can read Farenheit best so this was a great feature for us to be able to choose.

There is a blue tip on the top where you insert in your ear and this is to be kept on if your reading a babies temperature. However if your reading and adult or a toddler this should be removed. I can see that it could be easily lost as there is no way of storing this lid but luckily I havent had to take mine off as my daughter is still very young.